The Inside of an Apple

Joshua Beckman is at his most immediate and attentive in The Inside of an Apple. His sincere, spare poems place the reader within the personal space of the author from inside his apartment to the mountains. From this perspective, the reader experiences a revelation of consciousness and a surprising generosity of spirit.

Beckman’s speakers seem not to search for anything, per se, but see in all things an animating spirit, inseparable from the physical.Diego Báez, The Rumpus

Beckman's one of my favorite living poets—unsoiled as he is by trends and camps. He walks in stride with Whitman and Niedecker and Ginsberg somehow, without sounding like a throwback full of archaisms or faux wit. Joshua Marie Wilkinson, HTMLGiant

That’s the kernel, the approach, of The Inside of an Apple: a minimalist in transit, on a strict ration of words per line, each poem feeling as if it took its own length not just to devise its closing phrase, but to earn it. Peter Longofono, Coldfront

With plainspokenness and the juxtaposition of modern and traditional imagery, Beckman creates a sense of both timelessness and timeliness—no easy task. It’s Beckman’s sincerity, combined with his ability to not take things too seriously, that gives his poems a subtle power. It’s rare to read work that feels simultaneously contemporary and ancient.Michelle Aldredge, Gwarlingo

The poems that make up The Inside of an Apple are light-hearted even when they’re sad. They’re also fragmentary, appearing without titles, blurring where one poem ends and the next begins. But this is by design; the poems’ sentence fragments are highly visual, and show great care for sound. Elizabeth O'Brien, New Pages

These are poems that work gently, respectfully, insistently, almost reverently around the incommunicable. They do this without giving up on communicating something important.Dan Alter, Poetry Flash